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When I was younger, I probably would have been up-in-arms over this, on the side of Sparkfun, but now that I am fifty-seven and have over thirty-five years in the engineering business, mostly in the automotive world, I have a differing opinion. Having watched the demise of the U.S. auto industry, at their own hands, and through the stealing of patents and innovations by the Japanese, Chinese…and now the Koreans and Indians, I have to side with Fluke. No, I am not a pro-union zealot, I am a non-union, invented here person. If we want jobs here, we have to protect what we make and what we invent. Fluke is doing that and getting grief for what is rightfully theirs. Have you ever seen the side of a Caterpillar of John Deere heavy equipment piece….protected by hundreds of patents? Why do you think this is necessary? I am very happy that the two companies could talk and settle what is rightfully, a 100% correct response by the customs agents AND what is 100% correct in the Fluke’s best interest. After all, they trademarked it, it is rightfully theirs and THEY need to protect their company AND their employees. They did not have to offer Sparkfun anything, …..but they did. What a great company Fluke is. We should ALL thank them….AND, we should ALL than Sparkfun for their decisions and response.

Just looking into the mBed system. Unlike these kid’s comments, ( I have been in embedded controls development for 35+ years now), this is a great idea. I just started playing with the online compiler and really like it. Powerful, simple, no revision control, not a ton of crap on my laptop….. For those of you that cannot think outside the box, you can get tether software to connect your laptop to the internet through your phone….duh?, if you can stop texting long enough to use it. That gets your emergency compile for your 200 lb. robot stuck in the woods, (because you neglected critical debugging in the garage), back to the house. I am tired of paying $100’s of dollars for software IDE’s…no Arduino nonsense here. Powerful processors with super capabilities……

125 khz is a little tougher nut to crack. The antenna coil is a VERY long length of 42ga. copper. Also, the communications is near field, manchester encoded, back feed coil shorting. It works by shorting the fields out and the reverse emf is the modulation. In actuality, it is pretty clever, but very noise sensitive. Range is rather problematic as the received signal level falls off at the cube root of the distance.

lolol…… I am one of the patent holders on the 13.56mhz rfid tagging system readers and have been messin' with these readers and tags for almost 20 years. To just pull the coil and fold it is a No-no…lolol. Now, if you go back many years and look up a bit on the ‘Mifare’ system you can find out a little on how to use these. Quite a number of years ago, I designed an antenna as just a coil trace on the circuit board, (with the chip of course), which was then injection molded in a teflon button, (25mm dia. x 4.5mm). It would take up to 550 Fahrenheit….when applied to the bottom of the stool legs it made it REALLY slide in the lab too. So……is that small enough for a keyfob?

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